Piper (32 page)

“I told you. He needs his shot.”

“Well, go ahead and shoot him,” he said, erupting in a wheezy laugh that made his plug slip up onto his lip.

“Can we have a little privacy?”

“Is this a blow job or a shot?” he said, laughing again at his own joke.

“Have a little respect. I've got to lower his drawers.”

“Shit,” he said, pushing himself up out of the chair. “Come on, Wally. Give 'em two minutes.” The detective wasn't only crude, he was stupid. What did I know about diabetes? He hadn't even asked to see the needle.

I waited for them to close the door and then turned to Willard, straightening him up by the shoulders. His head bobbed like a floating apple. “What have you told them? Huh?”

His eyelids were heavy and he slurred his words like a common drunk. “I hadda take a pee …”

I looked down at his crotch. “You have to take a pee?”

He shook me off. “At the paper.” We were running out of time and he was just babbling.

I shook him by the shoulders. “Don't say squat or you're never going to see your dogs again. Do you understand?”

His eyes kept rolling up under his lids like mice hiding from the light. I could only hope my words were sticking in there somewhere in that fractured zone between the subconscious and the unconscious.

20

My dad showed up before a meal did. The beefy policeman who ushered him in belabored the obvious. “There she is, Mr. Scanlon.” Dad looked glum and older than when I'd seen him last. There was a bruised darkness under his eyes and his hair was mussed, not just like he'd been running his hands through it, but like he had Vaseline on his fingers. He moved closer and just stood over me for the longest time, his frame shading me with his shame and cooling my insides.

“I'm disappointed in you, Piper.” His voice was controlled. “The one thing I thought I could count on was your intelligence, but running away with Willard was just plain stupid.” He stopped like he was expecting me to look up at him, but I couldn't give him that satisfaction. He not only wanted me to hear his condemnation but to see it in his weary eyes. I trained my gaze on his oxblood dress shoes, still streaked with ash from walking around the fire. “You know how much I detest duplicity. It's lowdown, it's cowardly, it's wrong. I thought you were tough-minded. A Scanlon doesn't run and hide.”

I was warming up fast. I was a furnace and Dad was at the control panel, pushing buttons. “Don't say that, Dad.”

“You've done your grandpa no favors. Fleeing has only compounded his problems. Before this one is over, he'll wish we'd
put
him in that nursing home.”

I tried counting to myself, I might even have raced through a quick prayer, which in the temper I was in would have constituted blasphemy. I must have been tasting a nip of what Dirk had when his dad stood over him with the video camera, and I wanted to fight back with everything at my disposal. I stood up and faced him. “You've got it all wrong, Dad. Dead wrong. Get your facts straight before you blast away. Willard didn't set that fire.” I looked at him when I said it and with every duplicitous nerve in my body, I stabbed him with my eyes. “I did.” It was cold-blooded and he must have wondered what kind of a monster he'd raised that I could say this without blubbering and saying I was sorry.

“I don't believe you.” That's what he said, but he stumbled back from me like I was the devil incarnate. “The Bagmore kid saw him. You couldn't have …”

I grabbed the back of the steel chair and pushed it as hard as I could straight at him. He dodged and the chair clattered to the floor between us. “Why do you say that? You don't even know me. I'm
not
a Scanlon.
That's
the lie.” My arms were flailing, searching for more things to fling. “I don't look like you. I don't think like you. I'm a freak in more ways than you'll ever know. I hated John Carlisle for what he did to Mom and I hated him for the monster he made out of you. Burning his newspaper was the smartest thing I've ever done. And I don't care if he
was
in there.” I wasn't thinking any more, I was vomiting. A year's worth of bile.

“You don't mean that.”

“You don't know what I mean.”

“You're covering up. They saw him. There are witnesses.”

“If you're so cocksure I couldn't do it, how can you be so cocksure Mom was sleeping with Carlisle?”

“Quit it!”

“I'll tell you one thing. If Willard
had
set that fire, I'd cover him up till hell froze over. Course you wouldn't understand that …”

He reached over and put his hands on my shoulders. “Don't say something you'll regret.”

I shook him off. “Jesus, Dad! You're worse than I thought. You could use a little coverup. Isn't anyone worth that much to you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mom! I'm talking about Mom. You were ready to throw her to the masses. ‘There she is folks. My wife was banging the boss!' If that's what you call truth, I'll take the slimiest lie in hell any day.”

“You're flipping out. I was exploring the story.”

“You were her husband. Isn't there a shred of compassion in you? Were all those pretty poems you recited for us just bullshit? How could you even think of trading her for Carlisle?” I was yelling.

The jailer stuck his head in the door. “Everything all right in here?”

Dad waved him off and waited for the door to close. Then he came over and tried to put his arms around me. As much as I craved his allegiance, I didn't want to be lulled out of this one and I kicked him in the shins. My skinny, breastless, body had never felt stronger, nor a lie more succulent. If I let him hug me, I was afraid I might succumb to his resignation.

His eyes were enlarged and they told what he couldn't admit to. He was scared too. Scared of me. Scared of our whole life. “Stay in here then. Rot with your stupidness.”

He turned for the door and for a moment I considered throwing myself around his ankles, reminding him how Mom would have felt to see her father in jail, but I was too afraid he'd boot me away. I'd gone way over the bright line we'd painted between ourselves. It was hopeless. If he was willing to crucify his wife in public, how could I expect him to save a foolish old man and a daughter that wasn't even his?

If he could have just admitted he was on the wrong side, I probably would have melted and burst out with the truth, how Dirk had lied about John Carlisle, how I understood as well as he did the sorry situation Mom had gotten herself into, but as long as he was going to keep his distance, I was going to hold onto the drop of truth I had and hug it like it was the last jug of water on earth. Dad was the one who'd taught me that. Truth was power and as long as I had a molecule of it that he didn't, I still had something to bargain with. Give it up and Willard was dead meat.
I know what I'm doing, Dad. Some things are more important than high-mindedness
.

They moved me to a room with a thin bed that resembled a doctor's examination table. As I lay there, I began to feel panicky and rehearsed in my mind what I was going to say when they questioned me, manufacturing details for my story to make it more credible. Maybe I could get Dirk to back me up. He'd lied about John Carlisle, why wouldn't he lie about me? But nobody read me my rights and nobody arrested me. Why didn't they just bring in a stenographer or a tape recorder and ask me to spill my guts? I was beginning to suspect Dad's hand in this. Maybe he was going to try and protect me even if I was hell bent on getting myself convicted.

On reflection, I decided that my confession, though possibly rash, wasn't foolish. I knew kids at school who'd stolen cars or broken into houses and gotten off with a month for a first offense. Whatever they did to me, there was no way they were going to be as hard on a juvenile as an adult. Besides, I was stronger than Willard and without dependents.

I tried the door knob again. This time it was locked.
Come on, somebody talk to me. Either throw the book at me or let me out of here, but don't just leave me in limbo
.

Maybe because this was beginning to feel like my last night of freedom, I had a powerful urge to pleasure myself. I lay down on the little bed and pulled the sheet up over me. Maybe I just wanted some reassurance that part of me was still functioning properly. I unzipped my jeans and pushed my pants down so I had room to work, to transport myself the way I had so many times, to experience the intimacy from afar I couldn't seem to accomplish up close. My fingers were cold and I rubbed them down the insides of my pantlegs. The fingers had to be warm.

I tried to think of Rozene, her sweetly curved mouth, the patches of tan skin I'd touched on her neck, the insides of her arms, the fleshy part of her calves. But I was dry, flaccid, pathetic. I was sick, maniacal. I was the killer whale who'd ostracized myself from the pod. I thought of the stories I'd read about arsonists who sat across the street from the fires they'd set, masturbating towards the heat.
Well, who was I kidding? I was no better than they were
.

I was still sleeping the next morning when the policeman who'd checked us in brought me a tray with orange juice, cocoa (they said I had to be eighteen to have coffee), and biscuits I recognized as Marge's. She must have had the contract for the jail, not exactly something a person would advertise, but her food had never tasted better.

About eleven-thirty, the same officer opened the door to let Dad in and my nervous system shifted to red alert. I didn't have the strength to go over this again. I had nothing more to say. He was wearing his camel sport jacket, something he often wore to work, and there was a puzzled expression on his face, a mixture of fatigue, relief, and deep concern.

“How was your night?” It was an improvement over the start of yesterday's conversation, but I could tell by the way his eyes were drilling me that he knew something I didn't know. Who didn't?

“Fine. Stiff.” The same as my demeanor.

“I know who set the fire.” He said it calmly, devoid of any sense of victory, and I decided I should just keep my mouth shut and listen for a change. “I received a letter today from John Carlisle. It's postmarked the day he died.” He took a deep breath and crossed his arms over his rib cage like he was trying to provide support for his lungs. “John set the
Herald
on fire. It was self-immolation.”

“Oh, God.”

“He had to stop the hemorrhaging. It was a matter of honor.”

I'd never gotten past the notion Willard had set the fire, so I'd never even entertained the idea it could be John Carlisle. He was the victim, not the perpetrator. But I wondered why, if it was a matter of honor, he hadn't done himself in when Mom died in his Jacuzzi? If it was family reputation at stake, why hadn't he fallen on his sword when Dirk made his accusations? “That means he was guilty of the molesting stuff?” I said.

He shook his head. “I don't know.”

“But, Dad, he killed himself. Doesn't that speak for itself?”

“I'm not comfortable judging other people. Not without all the evidence.”

“Course that will never happen now, will it?”

“The law doesn't try dead people,” he said. “At this point, it's pretty much between him and his creator.” His answer seemed like a cop-out.

“Don't the survivors have a right to know the truth?”

“What's truth? Something a newspaper reporter and his editor happen to agree to?”

This was starting to sound a lot unlike the Tom Scanlon who'd been nominated for a Pulitzer prize. “I can't believe you're talking this way. You've always been … well, it sounds like you don't care.”

“Oh, I care.” His facial expression had lost its ambiguity. He was melancholy again, the same melancholy I'd heard in his weeping after the phone call to Seamus that night. He reached into a breast pocket and pulled out an envelope that was ragged on one side where he'd probably opened it hurriedly with his finger. “He talks about your mom too. Here.” He offered me the envelope.

I recoiled my hands, unsure if I was ready for John Carlisle's version of the truth. “What does it say?”

“Don't let some newspaper hack put his spin on it. Read it yourself.”

Wasn't this what I'd been hungering for since Mom's death, a confession by someone who had nothing to lose, someone who knew that in a matter of hours no meaningful retaliation could be launched against him? Wouldn't the utterances of a dying man be truth? I knew I should take the ragged envelope Dad was holding out to me, but I couldn't lift my arm. If I didn't like what he said, I could never undo his words, never cross-examine him, beat on him, or scream in his face. “Why do you want me to read it? You didn't even want me to see what
you
were writing about Mom.”

“Maybe it's because I'm running out of answers.”

I let my chin drop to my chest and reached up for the letter. Knowing that the man who had stuffed it and licked it shut was dead made the flesh on my fingers tingle when Dad slipped it into my hand. The return address was for his yellow, turreted Queen Anne on top of the hill, the family home, the last house on earth Mom had walked into. His cursive was delicate, formal, and perfectly even. There was a respectful “Esq.” after Dad's name. “I hope I don't regret this,” I mumbled as I pulled the pages out of the envelope and unfolded them in my lap. Dad came over to the padded bed and sat down next to me.

Dear Tom,

When you get this letter, I'll be gone, free of this mortal coil as they say. I thought you, of all people, deserved an explanation. I couldn't have asked for a better colleague. You not only brought a professionalism to the paper I could only pretend to, but you were a friend, a man I could count on to stand up to my detractors, of which there were many, I know.